By Tom Ferrick Jr.
This is a story about change in the city, but it begins with a disclaimer.
Taken as a whole,
A look at the city's vital signs shows only slight movement, up or down, on most key indicators. On the plus side, the population of the city appears to have risen slightly, reversing a trend of the last 50 years. Crime is down; the value of people's homes rose, though the housing market took a beating during the recession.
On the other side, the city continues to lose jobs (minus 47,000 since 2000) and the income of many
This helicopter view of the city can be misleading.
Significant changes happened in a number of neighborhoods in the last 10 years.
Sometimes they are visible at street level: signs of renewal along
But, the eyes can deceive or tell only a piece of the story. Fortunately, we have other tools available to dig down.
The Census Bureau's American Community Survey is an annual sampling of households that collects a wide range of economic and demographic data. This sampling used to be done only as part of the decennial census, but no more. Now, each year the Census Bureau sends long-form questionnaires to three million American households.
After five years of sampling, the Census Bureau is able to release data at the census tract level. The ACS data for
At Metropolis, we used ACS data to take a closer look at
We didn't measure one neighborhood against the other -- it would be ridiculous to compare Chestnut Hill, the city's wealthiest neighborhood with Fairhill, its poorest. Geographically, they are both in the same city. Statistically, they are on different planets.
Instead, we measured each neighborhood against the city as a whole, using five indicators: household income, home values, poverty, growth or decline in population and, finally, the ratio of homeowners to renters.
Here is how the city fared in those categories between 2000 and 2009.
To starters, we eliminated all the neighborhoods that tracked along the same lines as the city. This was the majority of the neighborhoods, including both Chestnut Hill and Fairhill. Though one remains wealthy and the other poor, their condition did not change much over the decade. (Go here for an explanation of how we arrived at the list.)
This left two sets of neighborhoods as outliers: those who did much better than the citywide average when it came to homeownership, growth in income, home value and population. There were 10 of these neighborhoods, home to 217,000 people.
The second set were those that fared worst when compared to the city average. There were 10 of these neighborhoods as well, with a total population of 262,000..
This divided the city into three types of neighborhoods: those that grew and prospered the most during the decade, those that remained basically unchanged, and those that faced a lot of stress in the last 10 years.
The two outliers tended to be clustered geographically. The neighborhoods that prospered the most radiated out in a circle from
On a map, those under stress formed a rough Y that began at
There were anomalies, as there always are in
Grays Ferry, the small neighborhood that lies to just south of Center City, came under the greatest stress during the decade, due mostly to a steep decline in household income, an increase in its already high poverty rate, and drops in homeownership and population. It started the decade poor and got poorer.
A few blocks to the north sits Schuylkill/Southwest Center City -- South of South or SoSo, as it is called. It prospered the most of any neighborhood during the decade, with home values rising 386 percent (compared to the citywide +116%), median household income rising 56 percent (compared to a citywide decline of -7%). It went from working class to middle class in 10 years.
These trends did not begin on
In the Lower Northeast, demographers predicted changes in the mix and wealth of the population 20 years ago. Neighborhoods such as
In the late 80's, the concentration of residents aged 65 and older was significant. In the same way they moved into the neighborhood en masse, they started to "age out" of the neighborhood -- die or retire to
As predicted, it caused a huge turnover in population.
This is an example where changes in a neighborhood are not always visible to passersby.
Go to the corner of
Today, though, the corner grocery store is Dominican and
The changes are not always so subtle. No one familiar with Frankford over the years can deny the deterioration in the neighborhood: a high-vacancy commercial strip, an increase in abandoned homes. More poverty and much more crime. (Though crime data was not included in this analysis, the police district that includes Frankford now has the highest crime rate in the city.)
The stressed neighborhoods on this list are like the houses on a single block. Some are still solid, but showing cracks in their facades (Cedarbrook, East Mt. Airy.
Obviously, the recession hit hard in these neighborhoods. (Look at a map of home foreclosures and it would be filled with dots in these same stressed neighborhoods.) Some of these trends could be reversed when we see better economic times.
But there are broader and deeper trends at work as well. These neighborhoods have stalled or declined because of wealth -- or lack thereof.
When it comes to income, the needle is stuck for two large groups of Philadelphians: blacks and Latinos. In 2009, 72 percent of all African-American households and 76 percent of Latino households had incomes under $50,000 a year -- roughly the same proportion as it was 10 years ago.
The stress in many of these 10 neighborhoods is due to the fact that the incomes of many working class and middle class families remained frozen through the decade. By standing still, they fell behind. Inflation diminished the value of their wages; the recession took away their jobs, the banks foreclosed on their homes.
This is not a